How To Make Money With Photos

Friday, May 16, 2008

Now that you have signed up for Imagekind, created your websites and signed up with flickr, the next site you should concentrate on is Redbubble. Redbubble is a lot like the other photos sites we have discussed so far on this site. After you sign up you should begin by uploading a few of your best photographs. Don't forget to put tags and a link back to your photo website in the description of each photo. This way when someone is admiring your fine work they can click on the link and find themselves at your photo website! As you know by now, the more traffic to your website the more chance of someone clicking on your ads and making money through Google Adsense without even selling any of your work!

Redbubble is a bit more of an art site then Flickr or Imagekind so they have even more to offer. You can sell your photographs in the form of greeting cards, matted print, laminated print, mounted print, canvas print, framed print and poster form. Remember though to upload the highest resolution photograph that you can. If the image is too small it will not be available for sale in the certain formats like poster which requires a very large image. Also, just like Imagekind you can choose your markup on the photographs. (Don't be too greedy or no one will buy your work!)

Redbubble's group are also very important if you want to get any exposure to your work. You can search through the groups to find which ones suit you best or just create your own! This is a great way to meet new photographers, and perhaps even make a sale or two in the process.

Another one of my favorite features of Redbubble is the gadgets they provide which can easily be displayed on your photo site, or any other sites that you manage. You can see my personal Redbubble gadget on the sidebar of this site right under "My Redbubble". As you can see, it is a lot like a slideshow and there are a couple variations that you can choose from here! You can also have this gadget displayed on your Facebook profile with just a couple clicks.

Friday, March 14, 2008

So now that you have created your websites, and setup a Flickr account, the next step is to link your Flickr account to a site called Imagekind. Imagekind is a place where you can upload your photos and sell them in poster form, custom framed art, and even greeting cards!

The best part about Imagekind is that you can sell your work in all the forms above without having to do any work besides uploading your photos. They take care of the rest, you just setup the markup that you would like to have on your photos and collect the paycheck!

Now, of course, in the beginning you don't want to put very much of a markup, but once you make a name for yourself, there is no limit to what you can charge as long as people are willing to fork up the cash.

Ok, so here is where Flickr comes in, what you need to do is go to the sign up screen for Imagekind. Here you will find a link that says "sign in with your Flickr account". Simply choose this and link the two accounts. Now every time you upload something to Flickr you are just one step away from putting it online for sale to anyone in the world!

You will need to create a photo gallery in Imagekind and then select "Upload Photos From Flickr" in the top right corner. From here you can simply drag your photos into your Imagekind gallery! Don't forget though to name, and make a description for your photos when you put them into Imagekind. This will help people find your photos inside Imagekind. You can also add a link inside the description of the photos on Imagekind which will bring traffic back to your photosite which will in turn help with your Google adsense income.

As if that wasn't enough reason to join, you can also get banners like the one you see here on this site on the right side to show off your work. If you run other sites that are not photosite you can put these banners on these sites to get more traffic and in turn more sales on your photos.

Did I mention that Imagekind is free so what are you waiting for? Go ahead and sign up, or check out my work here for more examples! Good luck to you all, and be sure to let me know if you have any questions or problems...

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

So, now that you have yourself a blog or website to showcase your photos the next step is to promote them a bit through the site Flickr. Flickr is basically the biggest picture sharing site out there in Cyberspace, so there is a good chance you have already heard of it. It is a free service to sign up for, and is now owned by Yahoo so you do need to get a Yahoo account if you don't already have one.

Once you have signed up it is time to start posting a few of your photos from your new photography sites. Before you upload the picture, make sure you put a mark on your photos to show that they belong to you. What I like to do is open them with Paint and then add a tiny bit of text in one of the corners of the picture so people who download your images will know where they came from, and how to get back to your site. Click on the picture below to see an example of my mark in the top corner...

Once you have added your mark to the image simply upload it to Flickr. Now it is very important to have a good title, a detailed description of the image, and most importantly a link back to your site that the photo came from. The link is accomplished by simply adding it to the description, all you need to do is copy the URL of your site for example http://natureswallpaper.blogspot.com. Once you type this Flickr will automatically make it a link. This way when an individual is viewing or commenting on your image on Flickr they can click on that link and discover your photo site!

So, now that you have upload a few photos to Flickr it is time to join up for some Flickr groups. An easy way to find groups is to take an image like the one above which is a picture of the beach in Hawaii and search for groups like, Water, Beaches, Hawaii, Ocean, Ect. Join these groups and then submit your photos to these groups. Flickr makes this quite easy to do, when you are looking at an individual picture just click on "send to group" above the picture. A list of all your groups will come down, and you can submit your photos to any of them.

This should help you not only get traffic and comments to your flickr photos, but it will also trickle traffic through to your photo sites from the links that you put in each of your photos posted on Flickr.

Make sure to fill out your Flickr profile and add your website link in there as well. You can also make a few friends along the way. You would be surprised how quickly you can build a good base of contacts. When someone makes a nice comment about one of your pics, add them as a friend, it is just that simple...

Stay tuned to the blog to learn even more about getting traffic to your photography site from Flickr and benefiting from Flickr's relationship with the site Imagekind...

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The first thing you should do when you set out to make some extra cash from your photos is to get a website or blog. Now I know what you are thinking, "great now I have to shell out some coin", but that's just not true. There are plenty of places out there that provide free websites or blogs.

The two sources that I use are Blogger for my blogs, and Googlepages for my websites. Signing up for these sites is free, and since they are both run by Google it is easy to implement your Google Adsense into these sites and start making some money without even selling any photos! That's right all you need is some sweet photos, traffic sources and like I said before, a bit of patience.

First of all lets take a look at Blogger. A blog is pretty much a website that you can post in however much you like, and is sorted by date. Therefore, everything you post automatically shows up at the top of the page. You get to choose your own URL (website address) so you should try and choose something that people would naturally search for if they were looking for pictures. For instance, my blog addresses are as follows...

Once you have chosen a URL for your site you need to choose a title for your site. Simply try to have is match or come close to your URL, this helps when it comes to getting traffic from search engines and the like.

After this you can edit your fonts and colors of the site to make it more visually stimulating, blogger makes it quite simple just go to the "Layout" tab. Once you have the colors and fonts you want you can begin posting. You can post as many shots as you like on one post, but I normally limit it to one photograph per shot so people can comment on that specific shot.

Once you have posted a few photos you can sign up for Google Adsense and start putting ads on your blog. Be sure to read the terms and conditions so you do not put too many ads on your site. Also, make sure to use "channels" in Adsense so you can keep track of where your money is coming from. Adsense allows you to choose different shapes and colors so try and match your blog as best as you can. When you have the adsense code that Google provides for you just go to "Layout" and then "Add Page Element". After this choose "html/java script" and paste in your ad. Bam! You are done, and your ad should start to show up in about 10 minutes or so. Of course you can add links to other pages and gadgets to your blog to spice it up, but this is the basics.

Now for Googlepages, the setup here is slightly different as your content is not sorted by date, what you want to show up at the top of the page is your choice. Again, Google Page Creator is free so go ahead and sign up. As with Blogger you have to choose your URL and fonts, colors, title, ect.

With Googlepages I prefer to have a main page and then create a bunch of subdomains which are as easy as clicking the "create new page" button. You can check out my Googlepages for more info...

Stay tuned to this site for even more information, remember this is just the beginning, but once you have a photography site you can direct all the traffic you get from all the other sites out there that you will be using. The more traffic, the more ad clicks, the more money in your pocket!

Monday, February 18, 2008

This site will be dedicated to finding all the various ways that you can profit from simply taking photos! People are making money everyday selling their stock photos at places like bigstockphoto.com, fotolia.com, shutterstock.com, crestock.com, eyefetch.com, dreamtime.com, redbubble.com istockphoto.com, and imagekind.com! Our blog will show you the tricks and tips that can help you create a successful photography business online. All you need is a decent camera, a good eye, a photo blog/site and plenty of patience.

To get started check out these examples of my work at the following sites...

If you have any specific questions feel free to ask in the comment section below each post or you can e-mail us. Stay tuned to the site for updates, and be sure to bookmark us or subscribe to our feed!